


A Different Road

by Avelera



Category: The Hobbit - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, BAMF Bilbo Baggins, Drabble, Eventual Bilbo Baggins/Thorin Oakenshield, Gen or Pre-Slash, M/M, POV Bilbo Baggins, POV First Person, Pre-Relationship, Pre-Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-02-02
Updated: 2018-02-02
Packaged: 2019-03-12 17:54:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13552566
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avelera/pseuds/Avelera
Summary: After losing her husband while her son is only a child, Belladonna takes Bilbo on the road. There, his life ends up in a very different place, which in the end may not be that different after all.





	A Different Road

**Author's Note:**

  * For [maybemalapert (laconicisms)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/laconicisms/gifts).



> maybemalapert prompted: bagginshield: alternate meeting - bilbo baggins, actual adventurous hobbit scholar on a research trip meets thorin oakenshield before gandalf ever even thought to show up at the shire.
> 
> This ficlet was an unexpected delight to write, thank you so much for the prompt! Honestly I think it’s one of the first times I’ve written Bilbo’s voice and actually felt like I got it, which was a rare treat! 
> 
> I also completely lost it in my blog through an incident of mis-tagging, and just rediscovered it. It's just long enough to not include in one of my collected drabble anthologies (if only just). I hope you enjoy!

My mother and I left the Shire when my father died, the year of the Fell Winter. Many families had a story like ours, a simple chill turned bad in days when there was not enough food to keep up the strength of the body. Unlike those other families though, we did not wait around for the condolences, indeed not long at all after the cold spell snapped and father could be properly buried. We certainly did not wait around long enough for my mother to be courted again, for our family to be deemed “normal” again, if we ever could have been. My mother was a wild one, only my father of all her many admirers had the patience to see that he could walk beside her only if he did not try to keep her. Once he was gone, there was nothing to keep her at all that could not be brought along, and that was me.

I remember my childhood home, Bag End, especially the smell of it with its lingering aroma of baking bread. I remember the polished oak panelling on the walls, the sunlight that streamed through my window in the morning that lit the dust motes and signaled the coming of first breakfast. I remember with fondness the seven regular meals my father would cook, humming over the hearth. My mother was not so terrible a cook as the rumors said, but she did not love the art as my father did, and so it was his task while she took me on her long walks, to the market, over the hills and fields and taught me a little of woods work and tracking. All lessons I might have forgotten had we stayed, and the gentle yet relentless pressure of “proper” living in the Shire had driven such knowledge from my head.

My love of cooking is all I have left of my father, save for my general appearance which would be far more striking in its similarity were my life and face a little softer. We left all our worldly possessions behind save a few keepsakes and coin, I soon grew out of my old clothes, child that I was at seventeen nothing fit for very long. I don’t recall that my mother took the time to leave the house to anyone, that fine house my father had built her from his love. I doubt she had the heart to.

I might have loved that house too, given time and a lack of prospects. We can never really know. It belongs to another now, some Baggins offshoot no doubt, though I hardly inquired. I wanted to preserve it in my memory; the warmth of my parents, the golden light, the green fields through the window. I have only been to the Shire once in my wanderings, and saw the home of my birth only from a distance. I claimed the name “Underhill” and my origin as that of Bree, I was able to wander the old roads that still haunt my stranger dreams in relative peace, and then quickly move on once I had confirmed there was nothing for me there.

That is all that can be said for that tiny corner of the world in my life. For all that I am a hobbit, or a Halfling as some who will not be mentioned by name have so rudely called me. It has never held me since.

* * *

We went to Rivendell after, to my childish delight, and I will thank you not to scowl. We had gone many times into the woods looking for elves, my mother and I, but never found them. What fun it was to finally go looking for them in the proper place, where they lived! Age and wisdom has turned that memory over in my mind, and I see my mother’s smile for the sadness it carried, the relief she felt that at least this could raise my youthful spirits and distract me from the terrible loss I could not yet fully comprehend. The home of the elves has ever been a balm for the soul. I imagine she had her reasons for going there as well entirely separate from the happiness of her son.

I’m sure our stay there was only meant to be a short one, and indeed to the elves it likely was. Lord Elrond became something of a distant father-figure to me, though I was not the only ward there. I learned their language, their poetry, even their habit of dress. I could hardly have returned to Hobbiton after that, I would have been run out of town for putting on princely airs, what with the fine silk that was considered the plainest of clothes among their kind! I imagine I must have looked rather foolish as well, a pint-sized fauntling that was all the wrong size down to his feet. But one grows used to any sort of life before long and I never thought of my odd appearance again after the first year, even as my mother and I were the only two hobbits for hundreds of miles. I might have remained there in contentment the rest of my days, indeed I may return in my dotage to live out the remaining ones, but the world could not be kept away forever, even if I’d had the heart to resist it.

I have been a wanderer some twenty years, traveling from the very heights of the Eyries to the very depths of the Misty Mountains (and have a very amusing trinket I discovered there, with a far less amusing story attached to it). I have gone to the utter east until stopped by impassable deserts, south to the cities of Harad, and skirted the very borders of the dead land of Mordor. I have made my mother proud, and perhaps it was thoughts of her that brought me back just in time.

Barely in time.

Either by Lord Elrond’s art or her own indomitable strength of will, I was able to hold my mother’s now dry and wrinkled hand, one last time. I thought of how cold her fingers had been as we fled the Shire all those years ago, how fragile they felt now. I sang to her the tales of the lands I had traveled and earned one of her cherished smiles, though for myself I could not keep up one in return for long. Not when she closed her eyes and slid peacefully into the final sleep from which we hobbits at least never wake.

As for why I am back in Bree far sooner than I intended? Chance, perhaps, or providence. Perhaps I was meant to be here. They had barely aired out my usual bed, as I came back nearly a fortnight before I had reserved the room. I had thought the Shire would be more to me than a land of ghosts, I had thought to honor her memory there.

But Belladonna Took does not reside in the Shire, it was only ever a stopping point for her, like a bird alighting on a branch before once more flying free. I scattered her ashes at my father's grave and it felt proper somehow, that she will forever be dancing on the wind while he is planted solidly beneath the earth, and yet somehow they are intertwined.

…Forgive me, I am not usually like this in front of strangers, not especially in front of royalty! Indeed, I recognized the braids, there is no need to look so shocked. Your secret is safe with me.

So there it is then, the tale of how I came to be here, or at least the part of it that matters. Perhaps it is true that grief calls out to grief. I believe too that there are forces greater than chaos, that the will of good is alive in the world and not just that of evil. And I think this is just the sort of adventure that I am meant for next, if you will have me. That somehow, helping you find your father will help me too in putting to rest the loss of my mother. And a traveling companion for the road is always welcome, wouldn’t you agree, Master Oakenshield?

Ah, now there is a smile. I had wondered where it was hiding.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you for reading. If you enjoyed, a comment would be much appreciated!
> 
> If you would like an alert for when I publish original novels and short stories, you can sign up [here](http://eepurl.com/dnzuV1).


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